Sen. Smalley and the Left Are Wrong on Net Neutrality

Sen. Al Franken (D.-Minn.) is one of the biggest congressional proponents for network neutrality—which is socialism for the Internet. It ensures everyone equal amounts of nothing.

Franken and his (almost exclusively) liberal net neutrality cohorts argue for (amongst other things) equality of load time for all websites. They fail (once again) to recognize or understand the Law of Unintended Consequences.

You make the management of Internet networks untenable with oppressive regulations like net neutrality, and those who spent the hundreds of billions of dollars to build and administer them will have a tremendous disincentive to do the continued financial heavy lifting necessary to maintain them.

When these private-sector players are driven from the field—taking their billions and billions of Internet network growth and maintenance dollars with them—you will indeed have equality of website load time for everyone: SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW.

Then again, given the words of Robert McChesney—the Marxist founder of Free Press, the organization leading the charge for net neutrality—we may well have at work here the Law of INTENDED Consequences.

“At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control,” McChesney said last year.

With that in mind, reconsider the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s National Broadband Plan, with it’s upwards of $350 billion in government Internet infrastructure funding. That serves as a nice down payment on replacing the “media capitalists” McChesney and his fellow media Marxists wish to see divested from control of the Internet infrastructure they built from scratch.

Thanks for the $1 trillion, Ladies and Gentlemen of Broadband, we’ll take it from here. Nothing like the smell of nationalization in the morning.

Now to Sen. Franken and his recent address to Netroots Nation in Las Vegas—the annual gathering of leftist nuttery put together by liberal uber-website DailyKos.com founder Markos Moulitsas.

George Ou at Digital Society has a made a rather interesting observation about Sen. Franken’s Netroots musings on net neutrality.

Take it away, George:

“Sen. Al Franken bemoaned that without net neutrality, ‘How long do you think it will take before the Fox News web loads 5 times faster than the DailyKos?’ So for a little fun, I decided to actually check if Foxnews loads faster than the DailyKos and found that the opposite was true!”Results from http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test:

“Using Net Neutrality equal-outcome based “logic,” how can this be? Is there a vast left-wing conspiracy to hijack the Internet and oppress right-leaning sites like Foxnews.com?”Given all we now know of the left and their net neutrality intentions, I think we have the answer to George’s last question. And it isn’t a good one for those of us who like fast Internet, free markets and free speech.